Carolina Parakeet in Carolinas 89 



great number of Red-headed Woodpeckers and Parokeets, birds then 

 easy to procure, as they were feeding daily on the mulberry trees in the 

 immediate neighbourhood of my orphans" (1834:35). The area no doubt 

 was Charleston, at the home of the Reverend John Bachman. An Audu- 

 bon letter of 24 December 1833 mentions that vultures eat freshly killed 

 birds and that this was the second experiment of this sort, being a repeti- 

 tion of what he, Audubon, had performed before (Herrick 1917, 2:55). 

 Audubon had been at Bachman's place several times, but various cir- 

 cumstances indicate that the above events must have occurred during the 

 visit that ended with his leaving Charleston in early June 1832, after he 

 had spent the spring there. Both young black vultures and ripe mul- 

 berries would have been available in South Carolina before his de- 

 parture. I am confident that this is a good South Carolina record of the 

 parakeet and, despite its involved nature, perhaps more trustworthy than 

 some claims, where literary effect or promotional advantage may be sus- 

 pected. 



Audubon's record is in fact the kind of first-hand, unstudied and spon- 

 taneous evidence so sadly lacking in the history of the parakeet (even in 

 Audubon's own formal accounts). Memories are notoriously unreliable 

 and yet end up being much of what little we have. Memories also be- 

 come encrusted with information from sources quite removed from the 

 original observations, if any. Samuel Scoville, Jr., an amateur or- 

 nithologist, visited South Carolina in May 1937. Conversation turned to 

 parakeets (then alleged to be abroad in the state, as will be described 

 later), and a landscape artist in Charleston related that his grandfather, 

 born in the late 1830s, "used to tell of running out into his mother's gar- 

 den in Charleston, when he was a little boy, to scare away the paroquets 

 from the orange trees. Every year, too, he would ride over to Virginia 

 Springs on his pony, while the rest of the family went in the family car- 

 riage, and on the way he would frequently see 'conures' — the Carolinian 

 name for paroquets" (1940:560). The story may be true in the main; its 

 date of around the 1840s seems acceptable, but I doubt seriously if 

 Americans of that time would have called parakeets by the later pet-store 

 name of "conure." 



Scoville 's date of around 1840 agrees with the memories of George 

 Twiggs. He "was greatly interested in birds and . . . spent his boyhood on 

 plantations in Aiken (South Carolina) and Richmond (Georgia) coun- 

 ties, and . . . died at the age of eighty in 1930." He "never observed this 

 species . . . but ... his father told him that they were not uncommon in 

 Aiken County during his young manhood, about 1840" (Murphey 

 1937:24). 



These memories place the species as present more or less into the 



